1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to sharing of data in data processing units.
2. Background Art
Although some processors may have shared memory capabilities, they do not provide an architecture that allows the number of banks to be easily changed. Rather, the entire architecture of these existing products would need to be revised in order to change the number of memory banks. Additionally, these existing products do not have conflict resolution, full accessibility (addressability), or atomics.
What is needed is therefore is a flexible shared memory architecture that allows a designer to trade off performance versus cost without changing the architecture of the shared memory.